Demon Hunts

“I love how you say that like it’s normal.” I glanced up, looking for rubber gloves, and waved at the box when I found it. Billy handed me one and I did my best proctologist’s snap putting it on, then risked poking a finger into the dead woman’s ribs. The flesh dented like an ancient Peeps, with a soft rain of marshmallow cascading over my fingertip. Only it wasn’t marshmallow. I withdrew my hand and stared into the hole I’d made. It didn’t look like something that could happen to a human body. “Billy, those women who died back in March…did anybody notice anything like this happening to their bodies?”

I stood up, not wanting to look into the dried-marshmallow effect in Karin’s ribs any longer, and caught Billy’s quick shake of his head. “They’d all been eviscerated. Cause of death was pretty obvious. And they all had ID on them, so I think the bodies were released to the families pretty fast. I don’t remember anything like this. I guess we could get a court order to have them exhumed, if you think we need to.”

A shudder made hairs rise on my arms. “Let’s not unless we’re sure we have to. How about our other victims, has this been happening to them?”

He shook his head again. I stripped the rubber glove off and pushed my fingers through my hair. “What’s the date?”

“December twentieth, why?”

I’d known that. I’d known it very clearly, because tomorrow was the first anniversary of my mother’s death. I’d only asked in order to buy time. Sadly, the second and a half it took Billy to answer wasn’t nearly as much as I’d hoped to buy, and it didn’t give me any way out of proposing a supernatural hypothesis. “Tomorrow’s the solstice. These things tend to get stronger around the pagan high holy days.”

Pagan high holy days. Like half of them—more than half—weren’t marked in some way by the modern world and practitioners of most modern religions. Easter fell suspiciously close to the spring fertility festival of Beltane, midsummer meant a weekend of partying while the sun didn’t go down, and I didn’t think there was much of anybody fooling themselves about Christmas lying cheek-by-jowl with the midwinter solstice. Mardi Gras, Halloween—they were all tied in with ancient holy days, even if we didn’t always consciously draw the lines between them. I snorted at myself and shook it off; it didn’t really matter who celebrated them or what they were called. The point was, certain times of the year had natural mystic punch, and we were on the edge of one of those days today. That didn’t exactly comfort me.

Neither did the fact that banshees seemed inclined to swarm during the holy days. Twice this year I’d faced them, and I was in no particular hurry to go up against one again. They worked for a much bigger bad, a thing they called the Master. I only knew a handful of things about him, but none of them was good.

No, that wasn’t true. One of them was good: as far as I could tell, he wasn’t corporeal. No killer demon walking the earth. That was a win, and I’d learned to be grateful for small favors.

Everything else about him, though, scared the crap out of me. I knew he found me amusing, and it was my general opinion that being found amusing by alarmingly powerful entities was not something to be sought. I also knew that ritual murders, carried out by his banshee minions, fed him enough strength to keep an eye on the world. I knew he could come a hair’s breadth from killing a god, and I knew the only reason I wasn’t already dead was my mother had sacrificed herself to keep me alive.

I very much didn’t want Charlie Groleski’s and Karin Newcomb’s shriveling forms to be the work of banshees, because that meant the Master was stirring, and I’d already pissed him off twice this year. Unfortunately for me, that’s what experience suggested we were looking at.

“Joanne?” Billy put his hand on my shoulder, startling me out of my grim examination of the bodies. “You okay, Walker?”

“Are the bodies exsanguinated?”

My partner gave me a look usually reserved for his kids mouthing off. “You know they aren’t. You just wanted an excuse to use ‘exsanguinate’ in conversation.”

I flashed him a guilty little smile that turned back into a frown. “Yeah, but maybe it’s good that they’re not, since the winter moon murders were all pretty much drained of blood. Even if it’s banshees again, this is different.”

“If it’s banshees again I’d rather it was the same, so we’d have a pattern to follow. Holy shit!” Billy levitated about four feet back, with me right beside him, as Groleski’s body fwoomped into a much smaller mass. Dust rose up, lingering in the air, and Billy all but vaulted another slab to snatch up medical masks. He tossed one to me and put one on, eyes bugged above its white line. “What the hell was that? Where’s the doctor?”

“Here, Detective.” A red-haired woman wearing medical glasses over her own mask swept in, hurrying but not alarmed. “You did ask me to step outside.”

We had, because although Sandra Reynolds had been the coroner on this case for the past six weeks, neither Billy nor I had wanted to stand around discussing things like banshees in front of her. She’d been watching through the window of the observer’s room, the place where families were most often taken to identify the bodies of their loved ones. It wasn’t soundproofed, but with the door closed it was unlikely she’d have overheard us running through mystical answers to our murders. Magic didn’t seem like her thing. She picked up a slim metal rod and bent over Groleski’s deflating body, dust poofing up to mar her safety glasses. I felt a shock of relief she was wearing them. I had no reason to think the particles were dangerous, but then, I didn’t have a reason not to think so, either.

Groleski flattened a little more as she edged the rod through his remains. I was glad I hadn’t poked him after all. The guilt of making him collapse like that would’ve kept me awake for days. Reynolds muttered, “This is fascinating,” in a tone that suggested that it was genuinely fascinating, and also a pain in the ass. “None of the other bodies have shown this kind of exsanguination.”

I shot a triumphant look at Billy, who rolled his eyes as the doctor continued, “It’s not just blood loss. A thawing body should be—” she glanced at us and clearly decided to go for a non-technical term “—squishy. I have no explanation for the rapid decay into dust.” Apparently quite happy, she scraped a pile of Charlie’s remains into a test tube and stoppered it. “I’m going to have to take a look at this.”

“So,” I said much more quietly, “am I.”

I hadn’t been using the Sight, mostly because it’d shown me nothing useful when we’d come across the bodies in the first place. I let it slip over my vision now, and watched a trail of red and yellow sparks follow Dr. Reynolds out of the morgue. I’d heard guys on the force call her a spitfire, and thought her aura colors reinforced that.

To my dismay, hers was the only aura I got a read on. There were no hints of dark magic clinging to the disintegrating bodies. They just looked dead. I glanced at Billy just to make sure my mojo was working, and got a reassuring flare of his orange and fuchsia colors. Well, reassuring in that I wasn’t defective. Less reassuring in that I was still batting zero in the paranormal detecting ballpark. “Morrison’s not going to like this.”

Worry sharpened Billy’s voice: “Not going to like what? What do you see?”

“Nothing.” I leaned against the nearest non-body-carrying slab and pulled my mask down. “You don’t need that thing. There’s nothing more dangerous there than any long-dead body might be carrying.”

Billy tugged his own mask down. “Like bubonic plague, you mean?”

I snorted, waving him off. “They’re not that long dead. And besides, aren’t most of the annual cases of plague in this country in, like, Arizona? No, what Morrison’s not going to like is I’m still not getting anything. If they weren’t falling apart like rotting…” I couldn’t think of anything that fell apart like they were doing, and finished, “…corpses,” lamely. “Anyway, I’d just think it was natural if it wasn’t happening so fast. I don’t like to go back to the captain with nothing.”

“None of us do.”

“Yeah, but…” There was nothing to say after that, because the sentence would end “but you don’t have a crush on him,” if I was being flippant, and with the same sentiment expressed in weightier terms if I was being brave. I wasn’t brave. Or flippant, for that matter, because even though it was an embarrassingly open secret, I wasn’t actually in the habit of going around admitting I’d sort of fallen for my captain. I didn’t even like admitting it to myself.

Billy, who was a better man than I, said, “So how do we find something to go to him with?” instead of taking the opportunity to razz me.

“I have two ideas. Do you want to hear the one you’ll be okay with or the one you’ll hate first?”

He stared at me. “If I say the one I’m okay with, is there any chance I won’t have to hear the one I’ll hate?”

I held my fingers an inch apart. “A little one.”

“Let’s go with that, then.” He folded his arms across his chest and glowered at me, which would have been thoroughly intimidating if I was one of his children.

“Okay. We go talk to your friend Sonata and see if she’s in tune enough with the dead to get a rise out of any of our murder victims. We also find out if she knows anybody who can diagnose a decomposition like this one, because it’s obviously not natural. Then we go to Morrison with whatever we’ve learned.”

“This is the better idea? Share case details with someone outside the force? How much will I not like the other one?”

“A lot.” I tilted my head toward the door. “So shall we go talk to Sonny?”

Sonata Smith outclassed Billy by a mile in the rank of speaks-with-the-dead. She was in her sixties and lived in a gorgeous old Victorian up on Capitol Hill, exactly the kind of house I’d imagine a medium lived in. That, though, was the end of where she conceded to meet my expectations. Her séance partner was a surfer-boy-looking former theology student in his early thirties, and she liked wearing violent comic book T-shirts, neither of which seemed very peaceable and medium-like to me. On the other hand, Billy was a six-foot-two police detective with a fondness for yellow sundresses, so I should’ve known better than to try to lay expectations on what constituted typical behavior for a medium. Or anybody else, probably.

Either way, Sonny was one of the relatively few Magic Seattle people I knew, and pretty much the only one I trusted besides Billy and Melinda. Left to my own devices, I’d managed to meet up with entirely the wrong crowd, so I was happy to lean on Billy’s expertise instead of my own shaky judgment.

We’d called ahead, but Sonny still pursed her lips as if we were unexpected when she answered the door. After a moment she rearranged the expression into a smile and said, “William, Joanne, come in,” and stepped aside. We got about two steps past the threshold before she said, “I take it this is about the murders. Can I get you some tea?”

Billy and I exchanged looks, and I put on a patently fakey smile. “At least Morrison can’t be pissed if everybody’s already talking about them, right?”

“Not everyone,” Sonata said. “Just that awful woman on Channel Two. She broke the story this morning. The Seattle Slaughterer, they’re calling him.”

I winced from the bottom of my soul all the way out. Billy groaned. “Tea would be great, Sonny. Green tea is supposed to be good for you, right? Would enough of it make somebody invulnerable? Because Joanie’s going to need it.” He followed Sonata into the kitchen, and I trailed along behind, wondering how many different ways Morrison was going to kill me. I’d gotten up to four highly creative ways to die before Sonata got us seated at the table and put a kettle on to boil.

“I’m afraid not,” she said. “I don’t know of anything that’s that good for you.”

Billy, more cheerfully than I thought was appropriate, said, “You’re dead,” to me.

I dropped my forehead to the table and said, “Maybe not,” words muffled by the shining wood. It smelled faintly of lemon Pledge, old and familiar. “Neither of us can pick up anything at all from the bodies we’re finding, Sonny. Even the one this morning didn’t have a ghost lingering, and she was freshly dead. I was thinking maybe if you gave it a shot, or if you knew somebody who could…” I peeked up, trying for convincing puppy-dog eyes.

Sonata looked unmoved, not even blinking when the kettle suddenly whistled. She let it go on, piercing the air, and finally shook her head. “I know who should be able to help.”

I sat up, hope surging in my chest as Sonata went to take the kettle off. “Who?”

She turned her profile to me, concern thinning her lips. “Joanne, it should be you.”

CHAPTER SIX